Reflection for the First Sunday of Lent
In my first year of seminary, I had the great privilege of doing a 30-day silent retreat as the capstone of the entire first year known as the Spirituality year. I recall that the first week of the retreat was focused on praying and establishing a foundation of who I am before God. This foundation is important because it provides a firm foundation to fall upon when prayer becomes dry and sterile, when life becomes difficult, and when the cross becomes heavy. So, what is the foundation that I was taught in my 30-day silent retreat? The answer is simple. You and I are God’s beloved children. Based on this truth, the rest of the retreat was focused on deepening this truth and living according to this truth.
In today’s gospel, we see this identity challenged. If we look at the previous verses of the Gospel of Luke, we see that Our Lord accepts to be baptized by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. St. Luke notes that during this important event, the Holy Spirit descends upon Our Lord in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven is heard proclaiming Christ as the beloved Son of the Father, in whom the Father is well pleased. In today’s Gospel, which chronologically happens right after the baptism of Christ, Our Lord is led by the Spirit to the desert. After forty days of fasting and prayer, the tempter comes to Our Lord. It is important to note how the devil begins his temptations. “If you are the Son of God,” he says, “command this stone to become bread.” The first and the last temptation begin with this phrase: “if you are the son of God…” The temptations begin by trying to bring doubt into this important identity as Son of God. Our Lord, firmly grounded in his identity as the beloved Son of God, responds to each temptation focusing on his relationship with the Father. He knows the value of the Father’s word, the importance of the Father’s place in his life, and the total trust and confidence in his heavenly Father.
My brothers and sisters, in a similar fashion we are often tempted. Temptations almost always seem to be an echo of the devil’s temptations that we see in the gospel today. Temptations in general are always a way to persuade us that a cheap and temporal good is better than the Ultimate Good, i.e. God himself. Temptations offer an opportunity to find our identity, our belonging, and our worth in other things. In the temptations of Christ, the devil presents three things that offer such opportunities: the flesh, the world and ourselves. By tempting Christ to turn the stones into bread, the devil offers the pleasure of our flesh. In our own lives, we often see this in the form of bodily pleasures that pull us away from God. The second temptation that the devil presents to Our Lord is the presentation of the kingdoms of the world and their riches. When the bodily pleasures do not seem enough, we can at times fall victim to the desire for the earthly things. The world always contradicts the gospel message and the life in Christ is always seen as something repulsive. But for the true son and daughter of the Father, the world and everything in it is vain and empty. The last temptation presents a great pleasure in the ego. When the flesh and the world cannot satisfy us, temptations are presented to our pride. Pride, which is the mother of all sin, can easily enter into the heart of the follower of Christ and corrupt it. It’s possible that we can try to find our identity in the things that we do, in who we are without Christ, in what we achieve and in how we are loved by others. We can often try to seek out the admiration of others based on our qualities and our identity that does not include our identity in Christ. But we must always remember that we get our worth, our identity, and our inexhaustible love from God alone. Our essential and fundamental identity sprouts from this. In Christ, we are beloved sons and daughters of a loving and good God. That is enough.
-Father Miguel Mendoza
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